Minnesota CEOs stayed silent while federal agents killed, then called for peace. Target, Best Buy, UnitedHealth, 3M, General Mills — more than sixty of the state’s largest corporations issued an open letter on Sunday calling for de-escalation after fatal shootings by federal agents during immigration enforcement operations. The letter asked for “peace and focused cooperation among local, state and federal leaders” and said nothing about the people who were killed, nothing about who killed them, and nothing about whether what was done was wrong. The plain English word for the letter is evasion, and Minnesota is owed the courage to name it.
The corporations stayed silent for two weeks while federal immigration agents operated in the Twin Cities and people died. They stayed silent while protests mounted and businesses across Minneapolis reported sales declines exceeding eighty percent. They stayed silent while activists targeted Target stores and hotels and demanded that the business community take a public stand. On Sunday, after the economic pressure became undeniable, they spoke. What they said was that they wanted peace. What they did not say was that the killings were wrong.
The letter names “yesterday’s tragic news” and calls it tragic, but does not name what the tragedy was or who committed it. The letter calls for de-escalation, but does not name what needs to stop. The letter asks for cooperation among leaders, but does not address the families of the people killed or the communities the enforcement operations have terrorized. The gap between the language of peace and the refusal to name what broke the peace is the moral gap the letter occupies. When a corporation calls for de-escalation without naming the killings that made de-escalation necessary, the call is not for peace. It is for quiet.
“For I was a stranger, and ye took me in,” Jesus said. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The people killed during the federal enforcement operations in Minnesota were persons. Each was the body of Christ. The agents who killed them killed the body of Christ. The CEOs who stayed silent while it happened and then asked for peace without naming what was done are asking for quiet while the body of Christ is still on the ground.
The Torah commands the love of the ger — the resident alien, the stranger in the land — in more passages than any other commandment. “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The enforcement operation that killed people in Minnesota is the vexing of the stranger written into federal policy. The corporate silence while it happened is the complicity of those whose profits depend on not seeing what the country has become.
Those of us who built careers in corporate America during the same decades the bipartisan deportation consensus hardened — who accepted the framing that immigration was a policy question and abortion was a moral question, who voted the stock options and the tax cuts and told ourselves the border was someone else’s concern — helped produce the climate in which Target can stay silent while federal agents kill and then issue a letter asking for peace when the protests threaten the quarterly earnings. The present evasion does not cancel the prior complicity, and the prior complicity does not soften what the letter is. The CEOs who signed it are owed the recognition that they spoke when many others in their position have not. They are also owed the truth that what they said is not enough.
Pope Francis stood on the island of Lampedusa in 2013 and named what the world had become: a globalization of indifference in which we have become used to the suffering of migrants because their deaths do not move us. Seven years later Fratelli Tutti commanded Catholics to welcome, protect, promote, and integrate the stranger, and the encyclical is binding on every Catholic holding public office and every Catholic sitting in a corporate boardroom.
When Archbishop Óscar Romero stood in the cathedral in San Salvador on the twenty-third of March in 1980 and said cese la represión — stop the repression — he was speaking to soldiers who were following orders and to the officers who gave the orders and to the government that sustained the machine. The repression Romero named was the killing of the poor. The repression the Minnesota CEOs are not naming is the killing of migrants during enforcement operations conducted by the federal government of the United States. The structure is the same. The silence is the same. The call is the same: cese la represión.
A corporate letter that honored human dignity would name the people who were killed — would say their names, not call them “yesterday’s tragic news” — would name who killed them, would say plainly that what was done was wrong, and would commit the signatory corporations to material actions that cost something: refusing cooperation with enforcement operations, protecting workers regardless of status, funding legal defense for those targeted. The letter the Minnesota CEOs issued costs them nothing. It asks for peace. It does not offer justice. It does not name the harm. It does not commit to repair. It is a letter written to satisfy the protesters without alienating the administration, and the posture it occupies is the posture of those who want the noise to stop without the structure to change.
Mr. Fiddelke, Ms. Barry, Mr. Brown, Mr. Hemsley — you can issue a second letter that names what was done and commits your corporations to protecting the people in your communities. You can refuse to cooperate with enforcement operations that treat human beings as targets. You can act. The Christ you claim is the Christ who said the stranger is his own body. Your silence was complicity. Your letter is evasion. You can stop. The door is open.